Just couldn’t resist adding this to our
Campbell Town blog. I was walking around
the back streets on our last morning and came across a lovely convict-built
house with the following plaque outside:
“In the late 1800s Maria Burns lived here
and whenever she looked next door she may have pondered on a dream that in the
end had not come true.
Maria had been raised in the Cork Foundling
Home in Ireland and with many other girls from Dublin and Cork orphanages, she
came to the district as a servant girl in 1836, aged 13.
Her first husband bought the land at what
is now No. 6 Forster Street and promised her a dream home. However it was not to be. He was an alcoholic. One night while heavily drunk at the
Caledonian Hotel, he pledged the land to the local publican, and stayed at the
bar until he had drunk the proceeds.
After his death in 1852, neither Maria nor
her young family were heard to speak his name ever again, and he was buried in
an unmarked grave in the Old Church Street cemetery.”
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